page_title: Philosophy of history
section_title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
hierarchical_section_title: Philosophy of history / Operative theories / Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
caption_attribution_description: English: The portrait of G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831); Steel engraving by Lazarus Sichling after a lithograph by Julius L. Sebbers.
context_page_description: Philosophy of history is the philosophical study of history and its discipline. The term was coined by French philosopher Voltaire.
  In contemporary philosophy a distinction has developed between speculative philosophy of history and critical philosophy of history, now referred to as analytic. The former questions the meaning and purpose of the historical process whereas the latter studies the foundations and implications of history and the historical method. The names of these are derived from C. D. Broad's distinction between critical philosophy and speculative philosophy.
context_section_description: G. W. F. Hegel developed a complex theodicy in his 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, which based its conception of history on dialectics. The negative was conceived by Hegel as the motor of history. Hegel argued that history is a constant process of dialectic clash, with each thesis encountering an opposing idea or event antithesis. The clash of both was "superated" in the synthesis, a conjunction that conserved the contradiction between thesis and its antithesis while sublating it. As Marx famously explained afterwards, concretely that meant that if Louis XVI's monarchic rule in France was seen as the thesis, the French Revolution could be seen as its antithesis. However, both were sublated in Napoleon, who reconciled the revolution with the Ancien Régime; he conserved the change. Hegel thought that reason accomplished itself, through this dialectical scheme, in History. Through labour, man transformed nature so he could recognize himself in it; he made it his "home." Thus, reason spiritualized nature. Roads, fields, fences, and all the modern infrastructure in which we live is the result of this spiritualization of nature. Hegel thus explained social progress as the result of the labour of reason in history. However, this dialectical reading of history involved, of course, contradiction, so history was also conceived of as constantly conflicting: Hegel theorized this in his famous dialectic of the lord and the bondsman.
  According to Hegel,
  One more word about giving instruction as to what the world ought to be. Philosophy in any case always comes on the scene too late to give it... When philosophy paints its gray in gray, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's gray in gray it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.
  Thus, philosophy was to explain Geschichte (history) afterward. Philosophy is always late, it is only an interpretation of what is rational in the real—and, according to Hegel, only what is recognized as rational is real. This idealist understanding of philosophy as interpretation was famously challenged by Karl Marx's 11th thesis on Feuerbach (1845): "Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it."
caption: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, philosopher of absolute idealism who developed a dialectic conception of history
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